Gridcoin: POW for BOINC

It is estimated that the Bitcoin network is currently using in excess of 76,000MWh a day of electricity on hashing sha256 alone.

What Gridcoin wants to do is taken even if it’s a little portion of that essentially wasted resources and put it towards distributed computing (BOINC) which would benefit a wide variety of fields of studies such as medicine, biology, climatology, mathematics, and astrophysics, just to name a few.

It wants to benefit from the POW networks; it’s not changing the work. It’s simply repurposing what the work is doing. This allows the network’s BOINC contribution to scale properly with the POW network.

In order to compensate for a variable network rate, it also has a variable block reward which halves every 4 years (840,000 blocks), ranging from 5 – 150 GRC for a total of 168 million GRC. Rewards are based on this formula:

For reference RAC is the recent average credit one miner gets. The RAC is calculated by the average number of Cobblestones per day granted recently with this average decreasing by a factor every two weeks.

A Cobblestone is the credit which BOINC measures how much computation you provide. A Cobblestone is measured to be 1/200th day of CPU time on a reference computer that does 1,000 MFLOPS based on the Whetstone benchmark.

Since it uses the scrypt algorithm, many come to the conclusion that it would like to remain CPU/GPU only. What I find interesting however, they state just the opposite.

We wish for GPUs to contribute towards BOINC projects, so we do not take an anti-asic stance.

I believe the reasoning behind this is because in terms of distributed computing projects, they don’t care where the computing power is coming from. All of it is going towards a good cause, and if you’re in it for the money (as a miner, commercially some may benefit from distributed computing) I don’t think you’d be looking here in the first place.

If you are indeed in it for the money, Gridcoins website shows two fantastic examples on how you can do it. The first is to use BOINC for what they call “desktop Grid Computing”. In the first example, one would have a video rendering project, where they would charge the customer and pay proportionally amongst the contributors according to how computation they provided.

The second example would be a BOINC DAC, or a decentralized autonomous corporation. What makes BOINC DAC’s different from other DACs (Noirshare, Peershares, etc.) is that even though profit is being made, anyone can contribute towards a DAC and get rewarded with GRC.

I really hope that Gridcoin becomes a huge success, using computational power for the advancement of humanity as a whole is common sense, if only Satoshi had implemented it in when Bitcoin had been conceived. BOINC has already made plenty of success stories true, and now with the addition Gridcoin many more to come.